


What could have been. What would have been.

by BrisTime



Category: A Single Man (2009)
Genre: Hospital, M/M, a single man, a single man alternate ending, coma george, vulnerable kenny, what if george didn't die, what if kenny saved his life, what would kenny tell george
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-22
Packaged: 2018-12-26 16:23:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12062700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrisTime/pseuds/BrisTime
Summary: What if, on the dawn of December 1, 1962, George Falconer did not die. What if, instead, Kenny Potter got to him in time and saved his life. What if George Falconer lived.





	1. The Body

**Author's Note:**

> Watched A Single Man and could not bear the ending of the masterpiece. Though left to the viewer’s imagination as to what happened to Kenny, I wanted to imagine what happened if Kenny saved George’s life and he survived. What George would do, what Kenny would say.  
> Thinking about making it into a chaptered fic, let me know what you think~

The first thing he notices, is that the gun is gone. 

The gun is gone and somebody has moved the blanket that laid on top of him. As he propels himself up, he can feel the warmth of the fire near him and the sweat trickle down the back of his neck. Amidst the warmth, the hairs on the back of his neck stick up and he opens his eyes to find the room empty.

The room empty, and silent. The door to Mr. Falconer’s room was shut closed, but the lights could still be seen lit underneath it. Kenny had woken up from the sound of a shatter. He scrunched his eyebrows together as he blinked a few times to fully wake up. 

Waiting a second, Kenny didn’t hear anything else, and started up from the couch. 

“Mr. Falconer?” He slowly stepped towards the door. His breath shuddered as a large lump formed in his throat. Unable to swallow the lump, he started again. 

“Mr. Falconer, are you there?” Kenny approached the door and let it open with a slight push. 

“Mr. Falco-” 

The sight of him lying on the floor with his arms pointing outwardly made Kenny’s heart drop. His mouth dropped open as he looked over the body, back and forth, before looking up at Mr. Falconer’s face. His eyes were closed shut, with his chest still, not a movement to be seen.

Kenny dropped down to his knees and reached over to Mr. Falconer’s limp body. 

“Mr. Falconer, wake up!” Kenny said as he tugged him by the sides of his red robe’s collars. When the body remained still and his eyes were still shut, Kenny pressed his ear against his chest. His heart was still beating, and his chest lain warm below the touch of his hand.

As he ran back to the living room, Kenny looked around the couch before retreating back to the kitchen and picking up the phone. His fingers ran over the numbers before entering the digits rapidly and shakingly. 

“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”

To be continued...


	2. More Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> George is taken to the hospital, and Kenny can't take his eyes off of him. Minutes seem like hours, and Kenny reveals more than he ever has before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! To my surprise, quite a few of you had expressed interest in my first, very short chapter, and even urged me to continue it!  
> I really hope I do justice to Kenny Potter and George Falconer's characters.  
> I put in a LOT of research into this chapter (check the end notes!) and even read the full screenplay for A Single Man for specific details and lines. I hope you enjoy this chapter, and please let me know what you think~

When you lay to rest, you begin to fall asleep. Nobody is there, but you. Nothing surrounds you. Your eyes grow heavy with deep slumber as your body becomes still in the silence of the night. The ethereal beauty of it all, as you lay in peace.

You drift through space, falling out of your world. Nothing seems real, but you’re still asleep. The world rages around you as you scream, but you keep on falling through space, your arms and legs stretched out eager to grab onto something, anything. Nothing, not the wind, not the clouds, nothing is there to stop you. You’re falling, and nobody is there to save you.

Kenny was falling. He had nobody to grab onto, nobody to be saved by. George Falconer was dying, and he was falling. Maybe if he had reached to him in time. Maybe if he hadn’t fallen asleep. Maybe then, George would be alive and Kenny could talk to him.

His knees and back ached, as he kneeled next to George in the back of the ambulance and looked over to him. The sirens rampaged above him, seething through his ears as he blocked them out. His hands grasped the sides of the stretcher and bruised his palm. In front of him, a paramedic had stripped George down to his chest and had been working on him. The ambulance drove for what seemed like hours. Sweat trickled down Kenny’s forehead, making way to his warm face. All of it, all around him, was blurred. His eyes had stayed in the same place.

Kenny stared at George, his eyes searching over his face for a sign. Nothing. His eyes remained shut, his mouth protruding inwards, his chest still. The large lump that had been in Kenny’s throat formed again, throbbing painfully as he swallowed. His eyes glistened with tears, but none fell. He clenched his teeth against one another, his lips closed shut in a fine line. 

At last, he let go on the stretcher, seeing George be taken off of the ambulance and into the hospital. Kenny’s eyes never once moved from George. 

***

The last he had seen of George before he was taken off behind doors by nurses was his face. His hair had been messily swept over his head, his face the same as before. Kenny had run inside, only to see George being led away. He ran behind the trail of nurses before a doctor stopped him.

The doctor’s glasses hit his brows as he scrunched them together and pushed Kenny away with his hand.  
Kenny stepped back, looking behind the doctor as George was taken away behind a set of doors.

“We’re going to try to bring him back. Who are you?”

Kenny looked at the doctor’s face. He was an older doctor who had probably seen hundreds of people like George. “You have to save him, please! I don’t know what happened, I woke up and-“

“He had a heart attack and we believe that he then went into cardiac arrest. The paramedics worked on him, we're going to try to bring him back. What is his name?"

"His name is Mr. Falconer. Uh, Professor George Falconer. He teaches at San Tomas College. I'm his student, my name is Kenny Potter, I just brought him here and-"

"Hold on, one thing at a time, Kenny. His name?"

"George Falconer."

"Okay, what is your relation to him?"

"I'm... a friend. I am George's friend."

"Okay." The black-haired doctor had been writing on his clipboard, focusing his gaze on his writing.  
Kenny imagined how many times the doctor had done this, to how many people he had talked to, how many names he had written down, how many of those people had died.

"Please, please doctor! Is he going to be alright?" Panic struck Kenny, and his eyes finally let the tears fall down his face with a single blink. The touch of the tears on his reddened cheeks burned, his face struck with grief. His delicate eyes were red, and the wrinkles around them stressed. 

"We'll do everything we can Kenny. I'll be back soon." the doctor said before breaking eye contact and trailing off behind the ER doors.

Kenny stood in the middle of the waiting room, staring at the doors. He turned around and walked to a chair before crashing into it. Kenny's fingernails dug into the palm of his skin and he clenched his teeth, looking ahead with nothing but pain. He began crying again, and didn't stop. 

***

Kenny stood up right when he saw the doctor walk out of the doors of the ER and walk swiftly towards him. Kenny wiped his cheeks and rubbed his eyes, standing up to face the doctor.

"Hello Kenny, I have news on George."

"Is he alright? Did you bring him back?" Kenny’s eyes were wide in question, his mouth open in answer.

"Kenny, when the paramedics got to him, he had already gone into cardiac arrest. We were able to bring him back for some time."

"Okay. Well what does that mean?"

The black-haired doctor let out a deep sigh, looked up and down at Kenny, and then pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose. 

"Kenny, he came back for some time. During his cardiac arrest, his heart stopped working but we were able to resuscitate him. But Kenny, during that time he lost circulation of oxygen to his brain. He's a comatose patient now."

Kenny brushed his hair away from his face and bit the inside of his lip. "I'm sorry doctor, I'm not understanding. He's in a coma?"

"Yes Kenny. I'm sorry, but it often happens to people who wake up from a cardiac arrest."

"How long until he comes back?"

The doctor frowned, and Kenny could feel the tears well up in his eyes again.

"It could be hours, even weeks. I'm sorry Kenny, I wish I could tell you more, but the best thing to do is hope for the best."

Kenny nodded, but his fingernails dug into his palm again.

The doctor started again, "Now Kenny, Mr. Falconer is in our hospital's lists already. He had a heart attack last year and we gave him medication. He listed his friends and family as a woman by the name of Charley. We already contacted her and she is on her way. You may wait here, if you would like."

Kenny nodded again and the doctor trailed off once more before Kenny called him. 

"Doctor! Doctor, wait!" Kenny ran up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. "Can I see him?"

"Well Kenny, you weren't listed on his-" 

"Doctor, please..." Kenny pleaded.

The doctor pursed his lips together. He took his thick rimmed glasses off and rubbed his temple roughly. He glared at Kenny before turning around.

***

The doctor led Kenny to a room with two rows of curtains, before walking down the aisle to the end. Kenny entered the last set of curtains, where George laid on his bed in solemn sleep. His arms beside him, he had been changed into a shirt and had a blanket over him. 

"You have a few minutes."

“Doctor, can he hear me?”

The doctor stared back at Kenny, expressionless. “No, most likely not.”

Kenny nodded at the doctor before he walked out.

Kenny had changed into his sweater back at George's house when waiting for the ambulance, but he felt like the entire room was hot. He took off his sweater to reveal his white shirt and threw his sweater onto a chair. 

He pulled the chair from behind him closer to the bed and sat down next to George. 

Kenny couldn’t look away from George’s face. Less than a day earlier, he had been in a suit and tie, lecturing his English class on Huxley’s _After Many a Summer Dies the Swan_. He had brilliantly spoken about the persecution of minorities after his idiotic classmate Myron brought up the same nonsense everybody in his class always did. He had talked about fear, its ability to enrapture somebody as their enemy, its ability to paralyze one like never before, its ability to make one grow old and alone…

George Falconer, who had lived all alone in his small house on Camphor Tree Lane and no longer with his architect friend, did not look old. At this single, particular moment, with his features all gentle, he looked angelic and very, very, young. 

Kenny smiled at the thought of George reacting to Kenny calling him young.

“I was listening to you, you know. I know I said that earlier, but I was listening to you. I was watching you. You said we were invisible in class. I said that on the beach too. You talked about fear, and growing old by yourself.”

Kenny sighed and looked down at George’s hand. Roughened by the years, its touch was delicate when Kenny placed it in his own palm. 

“I saw a picture… of your friend. I don’t know what happened, but I know he left you somehow. And now, you live alone. I told you, I feel alone most of the time too, sir.”

Kenny paused for a minute, observing to see if there was any change, a movement on George’s face, even a twitch in his fingers. Nothing.

“I asked for your address, because I wanted to talk to you. I told you I wanted to discuss what we did in class, but that’s not it. I… I wanted to talk about more.”

Nothing in the world could express what Kenny wanted to say. His young, innocent face morphed into emotion. 

“You took what Myron said and you completely flipped it on him. You turned around all of that crap they were saying, and completely transformed it into something new. Something different. And you never did that before because you said you were afraid of sharing all you know. I might be mad like you said, but I want to know more. Lois called you cagey, but you are nothing like that at all, sir.”

At that moment, Kenny had realized that George could not hear a single word he was blabbering on about and stopped. What was the point if George couldn’t hear him? 

“Sir… George, you’re completely different. I don’t know a single man like you.” Kenny’s voice deepened as he looked at George’s face once more. 

“I don’t want this to be the last thing you hear from me. I…wish we had more time” Kenny’s voice trailed off. He bit his bottom lip, trying to think of what to say.

Kenny looked towards the curtain, seeing nobody was outside. Kenny’s hands trembled against George’s, and he looked at George. Still as a sleeping doe, he looked at peace. 

Kenny stood up, keeping his hands on George’s. He leaned above George’s chest and stared at his face. His eyes studied George, taking in every detail of him into memory, every piece. Kenny looked down at George’s lips, which were pressed into a fine line with the tiniest bit of gap in between. The softest of features, his lips had been pink and made George resemble a young god. Kenny’s eyes were shut, his lashes thick with tears, as his own lips brushed over George’s lips. He pressed a warm kiss onto his lips, letting his plump lips entangle in George’s own soft, delicate lips. The ecstasy of knowing that the life below him was one of the most precious, most heartened of them all, made Kenny euphoric. As his nose brushed George’s, his lips created the most complex pattern pressed against George, eager for a return to his deep desires. 

“Excuse me, nurse? Nurse! Can you please tell me where George is? George Falconer?” The voice of a lady with a thick English accent echoed nearby, making Kenny rise from his spot and let go of George’s hand.

As female voices conversed with the woman, Kenny peered out his curtains before fully standing up and turning towards the curtains. He licked his lips before pressing them into a line. He pushed his chair back to where it was before and grabbed his sweater under his arm. He stepped towards the curtains and pushed them aside, turning his head once more to see George. And then, he stepped out.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes about writing this chapter!~
> 
> -I spent over half an hour researching the history of CPR and its origins, if heart attacks can lead to cardiac arrest, if cardiac arrests can lead to comas, what comatose patients undergo, what American hospitals in Southern California were like in the 1960s, what the interior of those hospitals were, how ambulances ran in the 1960s, and even more. Needless to say, those details were quite menial in this chapter, but I hope they provided you with an accurate imagery of how the scene might have gone.
> 
> -I read over the entire screenplay script of A Single Man, looking at not only the interactions between Kenny and George, but the descriptions and stage directions written for them. Some "easter eggs" per se in this chapter, were Kenny's many, many references to George's class that day, their conversation after class and at the beach, the name of the specific college George teaches at and Kenny attends, Kenny's interpretation of the "picture of the man" in George's house, the reference to George being "a single man" *cue title sequence*, and the description of George being "angelic and very, very, young" being taken directly from the script's description of a sleeping Kenny. 
> 
> ~Thought those were some interesting bits to add about this chapter!


End file.
